


Alphabet Boy

by orphan_account



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Multi, Selectively Mute Hitori
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-10 15:53:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5592253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> so you won the spelling bee now<br/>but are you smarter than me now<br/>you're the prince of the playground<br/>little alphabet boy </i>
</p><p> </p><p>Alternatively titled "Hitori Uzune is an annoying emo who doesn't talk, and Kazuaki Nanaki is POPULAR"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so this is... a weird AU to say the least. Human AU, everyone's timelines are different (the adults are suddenly the same age as the kids, from canon) and thanks to different events everybody turned out differently.

Hitori Uzune was hardly a year old when he lost his parents. At one year old, of course, he couldn’t comprehend such things. Didn’t understand death, or loss, nor would he remember it in the future. The first time he truly felt like he lost anything at all was the day that he supposedly gained something. He was nine and a half years old when he got adopted from the orphanage into which he’d been placed after the deaths of his parents, and lost the siblings he’d gained when he went there. He’d gotten the privilege and responsibility of being a big brother, then had it pulled away the minute some infertile couple decided he was the kid for them.

They wanted to skip the ‘problem years’, and he was the oldest one there. Regardless of his temperament, and the fact that teenagerhood would just bring about a whole other set of problem years, that seemed to place him as the model prospect despite his obvious bitterness from the moment he met with them. He liked it at Heartful House. He didn’t want to ever leave it; he’d already planned on growing up and getting a job to help out, support the others, improve their quality of life beyond what the government gave to their caretakers…

And all of that was shattered the day that couple decided he would be the best son for them. From day one, he hated his new parents. He wanted nothing to do with them. The entire drive to his new home, he didn’t say a word. They tried to talk to him, of course, but he just wouldn’t say anything back to them. There was nothing they really needed an answer to, after all. They asked his name, but he was aware that they already knew it. They tried to tell him what his room was going to be like, but he ignored them completely. He didn’t care.

Once arriving at their home, they showed him his room, then told him to just wait a bit and get settled in. Of course he wasn’t going to do that. They told him when dinner was going to be, too, but he ignored that as well. He wasn’t going to /go/ to dinner. Just as soon as they’d left his room to allow him to settle, he listened for their footsteps. Once they were gone from the hallway, he opened the door and stepped out, looking around to see that they were going into another room downstairs. Perfect.

He made his way down the stairs silently. He’d had a lot of experience sneaking around, after all. His younger siblings had always been the type to want cookies in the wee hours of the morning, and what sort of big brother would he be if he didn’t go and get some for them? Really, his whole life he’d been good at being quiet, and he only expected to get better at it as time went on. The coatrack next to the front door… he’d noticed that woman hanging her purse there as they’d entered, and sure enough, it was right there. Her wallet was inside, because women’s clothing never had pockets big enough to fit wallets into them.

The real wager was never any of those factors, but rather, how much cash she kept on her. He couldn’t use card to buy bus fare after all… luckily, there seemed to be enough here, at least to get him close enough to Heartful House. He could walk the rest of the way, once he was nearby enough to know the area… hm, but the challenge here would be to find Hachiman Littledove’s bus stop in the first place. He shrugged to himself as he stuffed the wads of money into the pocket of his jacket. He’d figure it out, anyway. Plans thought up by nine-year-olds were rarely very good ones, nor were they commonly thought about for very long. Hitori’s was no exception.

Once outside, he just… wandered around. This town seemed to be at least a little bit linear anyway, so he could count on not missing anything as long as he went block-by-block. Surely he’d eventually find the bus stop, and as it was, he only needed to walk around for about an hour before he was able to track it down. Once getting there, he turned to the bus schedule and was pleased to see a number of locations that he recognized, the time for their buses, and the fare. He counted out the money he had, and it turned out that he had just enough to get to the third closest stop to Heartful House. Somewhere that he could easily navigate from… perfect!

He sat down on the bench to wait for the next bus that would be going there, keeping an eye on the stop’s clock the whole time. Correction, watching the clock unwaveringly. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do, and watching the seconds hand turn around and around served to be a tiny relief from boredom, at least. Finally, it was time, and he turned just in time to see the bus pull up, splashing muddy water onto the sidewalk. When had it started raining? That might make his walk a bit unpleasant, but he wasn’t going to just /give up/ on getting home. He stepped up and climbed into the bus, handing the money to the driver with nothing but a nod indicating that he was going just as far as that fare would take him.

He took a seat and leaned his head against the window. It was loud and kind of painful with the vibration of the bus, not at all as simple as they made it look in the movies, but he didn’t mind. When it was cold outside, the glass was always chilly, and even with the negative factors he liked the way that it felt on his forehead. He’d rarely been on a bus with his hands empty… usually he had to hold onto a bag of groceries, because the only time he took the bus was when the orphanage’s caretakers brought him along to go shopping. They were nice people… he wasn’t very attached to them, nowhere near as attached as he was to his siblings, but he still cared more about them than he did his supposed new parents.

It was also to be assumed, then, that he’d never been on a bus by himself. This was true; he hadn’t, nor had he ever been in one of its seats alone. He’d always had somebody trustworthy sitting next to him. He wasn’t ever much one for conversation, so that wasn’t what made him uncomfortable about sitting alone. The idea of sitting next to a stranger was what unnerved him, because he’d always been taught with all the fervor of parental propaganda that every single stranger in the world, excluding those that trusted adults said were also trusted adults, were awful and terrifying people. Of course, somebody did sit next to him a few stops later. A woman who seemed to be walking the line between middle-aged and elderly slid into the seat beside him, then turned to him and spoke, “You’re a bit young to be riding the bus alone, aren’t you? Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer.

“...Are you feeling all right?” She questioned, leaning over to try and put a hand on his forehead. He grabbed her wrist and glared at her, causing her to pull her hand back and chuckle, waving it dismissively, “Oh, there’s no reason to be afraid of me! I’ve raised three kids myself, and I babysit my nephew who’s about your age all the time.”

He just kept glaring, and her smile turned a bit more sheepish, “Ah, I guess your parents taught you not to talk to strangers… very well…” 

Hitori didn’t take his eyes off her as he turned to the window and wrote on it with his finger, ‘no. my parents are dead.’ and she looked taken aback, as anybody would after experiencing something this strange, “Well… then, whoever /did/ teach you not to talk to strangers did a very good job,” She shook her head, sighing, then noticed the bus grind to a stop and got to her feet, “Ah, this is my stop. Good luck, you.”

“Kaname?” Somebody else’s voice joined, and Hitori looked up to see the source of it. A balding man who looked to be only a bit older than the woman.

“Oh! Hello, Mr. Fukui,” She greeted him, then turned back to Hitori, “Child, this is Mr. Fukui. He’s a teacher at the elementary school in Hachiman Littledove,” She introduced the man, then spoke to him again, “This child won’t say a word. I really think he could use your guidance…”

“I see,” The man nodded, putting a hand on Hitori’s shoulder as he sat down and earning himself a wide-eyed look of indignance as the child grabbed his hand and removed it from his shoulder unceremoniously, “Well, you /are/ a strange one…”

Hitori didn’t really see what was strange about not wanting to be touched by or talk to a complete stranger, but to each their own he supposed. That woman had been nice enough, and he supposed this man probably would be too, but he still didn’t really appreciate it… and besides, this man was taking up a lot more space, causing Hitori to press himself up against the wall of the bus where the window was to avoid being in contact with him.

Thankfully, Mr. Fukui got off the bus two stops before Hitori’s stop, and nobody else took the empty seat he’d left behind, giving him a little bit of time to relax. He’d been incredibly tense the entire time somebody had been sitting next to him, regardless of which of them it was. It was… uncomfortable, but he could endure it if it meant that he could go home. Back to Heartful House.

When he got to his stop, it was raining even harder. His jacket wasn’t a very good one, either, so he was soaked to the bone within minutes of getting off the bus, and he’d hardly made any progress towards his goal. He was freezing, and that always made people walk slower. Not to mention there was no sidewalk along this stretch, so his options were to walk in the street and risk getting hit, or to walk in the grass next to the road and get muddy on top of freezing and soaked. He figured he should be fine if he just stayed near the edge of the street, though, so that’s what he did.

Of course, when he saw headlights approaching much too close to the side of the road for comfort, he sidestepped into the mud immediately. Better to stay alive and get a little bit muddy than to be hit by a car, but as soon as he stepped into the mud it slid right out from under him; this particular spot wasn’t grassy, so it had nothing to anchor the soaked dirt. He felt a shooting pain in his ankle first, then duller pains on the rest of him as he toppled over down the hill he didn’t know was there. He guessed that he’d gone a little bit further than he originally thought, if he was at the part of the road where the side dipped into a stream.

His head hit a rock at the bed of the stream, and he could feel the water moving quickly around his arm and splashing up the side of his face. The rain made it too dark to see very well, but a flashlight let him catch a glimpse of the blood being swept away in the stream, the source very clearly his own head wound. The flashlight… behind it he could see, just barely, who was there. If he hadn’t seen the man just twenty minutes ago he wouldn’t recognize him, but this was unmistakably that teacher. Mr. Fukui.

Everything was blurred together, when Hitori came to. He couldn’t tell what was going on, couldn’t see anything. All he knew was that he didn’t think that teacher intended to help him, so he could die here and never be found, which was a terrifying thought, especially to a young child. He felt like he only had a few moments of wakefulness before he’d go under again, so he had to make good use of those moments. He uttered the first sound he’d made in quite a while.

He shrieked.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hey kiddo. So you’re finally awake,” A voice broke through Hitori’s hazy conciousness the second he opened his eyes, as if the owner of that voice had been intently watching for the moment when he would come to. At the time he heard the voice, he hadn’t even woken up enough to become aware of anything. Moments later, though, he began to piece together his situation and his surroundings. He was lying down on something that was certainly not a hard surface, but would also hardly pass as anything comfortable. His clothing had been changed into something stiffer, trading the soft cotton tee shirt and flannel jacket for some sort of scratchy button-down.

Despite his eyes being open, the first things he’d noticed weren’t what he saw, but what he felt. Discomfort. He only actually started to process the visual information once he’d sat up and stuck his hands between his neck and the uncomfortable collar of the shirt. What he saw was a room where everything was bolted down, and on the other side of a set of bars was a man in a uniform. Hitori stood up, not moving his hands as he went looking and found a notepad in the well-anchored drawer of the combination desk/table of the room. The only writing tool was a soft crayon, but that would work well enough. He scribbled down a message, then held it in front of the officer with one hand, keeping the other between his neck and the shirt.

‘Am I being arrested?’

“No, no, nothing like that,” The officer shook his head, standing up and opening the door of the cell, “We were just afraid of how you might act when you woke up. Didn’t want you hurting anybody, or yourself. Come on out, kid.”

Hitori stepped out, then wrote another note, ‘Thank you. Where are my clothes? These ones are bad.’

“When the medic was checking you over we went and found some clothes in your size from our lost and found. Yours should be dry by now, though, if you want to go and change in the bathroom,” He offered, pointing back over his shoulder, “Then we are gonna have to ask you some questions. Any chance you’ll talk to us then?” Hitori shook his head, “All right then kid, we’ll get you a pencil. Probably easier to write with than that crayon, and more legible too.”

Hitori nodded again, putting down the notepad to cover his neck with both hands again as the officer retrieved his more comfortable clothes. As soon as he got them and was directed to the station bathroom he ran off and got changed; once he was back in his regular clothes, however, he realized something else. Overshadowed before by the awful feeling of the uncomfortable fabric, he was actually in quite a bit of pain. His head throbbed, and he was covered in scratches and bruises all over. There wasn’t a single part of his body that wasn’t sore in some way, and he suddenly felt sick to his stomach. Bracing himself against the walls of the bathroom stall he’d changed in, he vomited in the toilet, then flushed it quickly. He didn’t /want/ to know what it looked like, something subconscious told him that it would only raise more questions to which the answer would be ‘nothing good’.

After leaving the stall, Hitori washed his hands and his face too in the sink, swirling some water in his mouth and spitting it out to get rid of the taste of vomit. Having previously lived with so many other children in such confined quarters, he’d been particularly familiar with norovirus and other stomach bugs, and thus knew how to handle throwing up. In this case, minus the attempts at self-quarantine, given that he was fairly certain this bout with disgust was in no way borne of contagion.

Upon leaving the bathroom, Hitori immediately met with that same officer again, and was led to a room with a table where another one sat, till the officer who led Hitori there took the seat beside her and gestured for Hitori to take the one across, with a notepad and pencil set down on the table in front of the chair. He did as he was told.

“So, we’re just going to have to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind…” The woman said softly, and Hitori just nodded, “All right. What’s your name?”

‘Hitori Uzune,’ he wrote.

“And what town do you live in?” 

‘Depends who you ask. I say here. But it might be Hachiman Littledove.’

“What do you mean by that?” She questioned, then paused, “And, why are you writing like that? I haven’t been speaking so clearly that you could read my lips, so you clearly aren’t deaf.”

“Cut the kid some slack. If I’d been through what he has, I wouldn’t want to talk either,” The other officer spoke, and she shrunk a bit, muttering an awkward apology.

‘I live at Heartful House. Somebody living in Hachiman Littledove took me to their house and said I was their kid now but I wanted to go home. Also I don’t know what I’ve been through I was passed out. I just don’t like to talk.’

“Well in that case, it’s probably best that you don’t find out. When did you first meet Mr. Fukui?”

‘He did something to me, didn’t he? I don’t want to know what. I met him on the bus here. A woman too. Her name was Kaname. Accomplice.’ He wrote this with absolute certainty.

“We’ll consider this information,” The woman nodded, “I believe we’ve heard enough, anyway. We can contact your adoptive parents and get you home. I know you don’t want to, but you have to, okay? Now, our medic said you didn’t need a hospital, but that doesn’t mean you’re in good condition… How do you feel?”

‘Pain.’

“Well, we’ll let your parents know that it’s probably best if you stay home for a week or so. Wouldn’t want you starting a new school with all of your injuries…” The man offered now, then stood up and went to make a few calls; finding out from Heartful House the number of the couple who had adopted Hitori, then calling them to come and pick him up.

Upon arrival, his adoptive mother immediately ran forward and hugged him, sobbing. She didn’t /say/ anything but she certainly did seem upset. Hitori just tensed up, though, not wanting to be hugged. His adoptive father was standing back a slight distance, and Hitori could see over Mother’s shoulder that he looked both worried and frustrated. His words mimicked that appearance, “We were so worried about you! We called all the neighbors but nobody had seen you leave the house, and you were nowhere to be found inside! What in the world were you thinking!? You could have been seriously hurt!”

“Well…” The female officer frowned, stepping a bit closer with her arms over her chest, “He’s not exactly unharmed. I’ll explain to you what happened… In private. As for a reason, he informed us that he was… Trying to go home. It seems he hasn’t quite accepted the idea of being adopted.”

“Hitori…” Mother said softly, pulling away from the hug to look at his face and noticing that he had started to cry, “I’m sure it must be stressful, moving to a new place, with new people, but… Makoto and I are really going to do our best to raise you, okay? We’ve always wanted a child together, and we’ll take good care of you, and love you, and we want to keep you safe but we can’t do that if you run away like this…” She sniffed, wiping her own tears as his got worse, “We just want to be good parents.”

Hitori looked up at her for a moment, biting down on his lip to try and stop from crying as he lifted his hands and signed, ‘I know you do but I am a bad kid.’

“...What was that?” She questioned, frowning.

“It looked like sign language, but… I can’t translate it. Why don’t you write that down?” The male officer spoke now, as the female officer was taking Makoto into the other room to tell him what had happened to Hitori.

Hitori just shook his head and crossed his arms, staring at the ground. He stayed that way for a little while before he walked over and grabbed the notepad again, writing down something different than what he’d signed before, ‘I’m sorry.’

“Just… Please, don’t do anything like this again…” She sighed, pushing his hair back only to find it still somewhat sticky with blood, and she cringed visibly, “Ah… Your head…”

‘I fell in a ditch,’ he held up the paper again, face mostly expressionless again, ‘So this plan did not work out very well.’

“The way you phrase that makes it sound like you’re going to try again… How about we compromise? When we get the chance, we can go to visit Heartful House, and you don’t try and run away again. Okay?” She questioned, and Hitori thought it over for a moment before nodding slowly. That seemed to be the best he’d get.

‘Can we go right now since we’re here anyway? I left some things there also. You came and took me away very quickly. I hardly had time to pack at all.’ He held up the paper, and she nodded.

“Of course… I’m sorry. They told us that you were all ready to go…”

‘The caretakers try hard and are nice but they are not the best. When I got older I was going to take over.’

“I don’t think you would have been able to… and, if you don’t like the caretakers very much, why do you want to go back there so badly?” 

‘The other kids there are brothers and sisters to me. I love them. I want to stay there. I don’t want to live with you. I’m sorry but I don’t. I guess I have to though. So I will.’ Savage.

“Well…” She frowned, standing up, “I’m sure you’ll warm up to us eventually,” And as she said that, her husband walked out of the room to the side, looking mildly shaken. She locked eyes with him and he just frowned, whispering faintly (but not quite faintly enough.)

“God, Tomoyo. We’re horrible parents.”

“Don’t say that,” The officer said as she stepped out behind him, crossing her arms, “This isn’t anybody’s fault. It’s just something unfortunate that happened. If anything… this was helpful to us, in a twisted sort of way. He pointed out to us a woman that he called an accomplice… and as soon as we showed her photograph to Fukui, he cracked. Told us everything. Said that he’d been… picking his targets, with her assistance. That she’d pick pockets for children’s tickets to find out their destination, then communicate it to him via a code when they traded seats on the bus, so he could get off a few stops before and catch up… it kept us from determining for quite a while, why so many children were going missing. We couldn’t connect either of them to the situation, until today… in the rain, he mustn’t have realized how close he was to the police station. Your son shouted, and an officer on a smoke break overheard.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that… that he had that done to him. That he almost got kidnapped, or killed…!” Makoto groaned, pushing a palm against his forehead, “This has to be our fault. One day of having a kid, and…”

“He… he’s not going to do it again, though. I talked to him. He won’t do it again…” Tomoyo promised softly, holding onto her husband’s arm, “We need to… stop back at the orphanage, apparently they forgot to pack some of his things… If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s theirs. He went back to get those things, is all,” A nod in his direction showed that, for whatever reason, she wasn’t telling the truth and she needed the child to play along. He was okay with this. He’d never really seen what was so bad about lying anyway.

After getting a few more things sorted out with the police, the Akashiyas (as that was the last name of Tomoyo and Makoto) led Hitori out to their car, and he went to lean against the window like he had on the bus, only to pull away from the glass immediately after realizing there was still too much blood in his hair to avoid staining it, and also that his head hurt too much if he touched it with anything, let alone hard glass. The police station wasn’t all too far from Heartful House at all, so they arrived relatively quickly.

Once getting there, Hitori stepped out of the car first, before either of his adoptive parents got the chance to. He ran inside like somebody who was excited to be getting in line for a theme park, despite only going into the orphanage he grew up in. He knew that at this hour the tv (one of the few luxuries they got) was not allowed on, to keep the electrical bill within guidelines to keep getting federal waivers on it, thus rendering the living room useless. The caretakers’ bedroom and the kitchen were downstairs too, and one of the house’s two bathrooms, but the four bedrooms which the eleven children shared were all upstairs.

After dinner but before bedtime, all the kids threw the doors open and, with the aid of closets connecting the adjacent rooms and a badly designed hallway, turned the entire upstairs into a sort of common space so they could all talk and enjoy each other's company while doing their own solitary things. Mostly reading, though not all the same sort of things. Hitori’s books of choice were a gift directly to him from the local library, so he wanted to retrieve them. They were most useful to him anyhow.

“...Htori?” A small voice spoke his name wrong as she put down the mallet for the xylophone she’d been making discordant music on and stood up, staring at him. Hoppe was not quite as young as Tsukkun and Nacchin, who were still mere infants, but she was among the youngest of the Heartful kids, so she burst into tears when she saw him, “You got hurt!! The people who took you away hurt you…!”

Hitori just shook his head, then spoke softly. Hardly at all. Just loud enough that she could hear him, “It wasn’t them. I have to go again,” and as soon as he said that, everyone (for they had all tuned in by now) knew he wasn’t going to say anything else. He was much more likely to speak to them than to anybody else, yes, but that wasn’t saying much. All the children knew how much Hitori hated talking; it had helped speed the process of their learning to read,which was a bonus they couldn’t deny. Nageki had tried reading Hitori’s books on sign language, but was still just a bit too young to make sense of them when there wasn’t a necessity. A whiteboard worked just fine.

“So you’re really going?” Momo asked, pouting as she looked up at him. He nodded and frowned, looking away, “We’re gonna miss you, you know…” Another nod.

Despite his injuries and his less-than-great emotional state, Hitori leaned down and hugged each of his practical siblings before going back downstairs, clutching the books to his chest with the knowledge that, as soon as he turned away from one last look back, that he’d be stepping into another life entirely. Yet, he did it. Left that behind and crossed a threshold into a life where he didn’t have to look out for anybody, and didn’t have anybody to look out for him.

How incredibly awful.

Upon his arrival downstairs, Hitori discovered that the four adults were speaking to each other. Particularly, the first two he knew were speaking with the second two that he didn’t know half as well. He barely listened in, but it seemed to be some sort of misunderstanding, by the time it was finished and sorted out. The caretakers seemed to think that he was being returned, but much to his chagrine, he was not. The parents seemed to wonder why they weren’t told ahead of time that he had never once spoken a word as far as the caretakers could tell, but again to Hitori’s chagrine, that was not a dealbreaker.

A bit more talking, and an apology from the caretakers for not packing the sign language books, and an apology from the parents for not keeping a better eye on him later… it was time to leave. Head bowed to stare at the ground, watching his feet on the carpet he’d been so familiar with for so long, the only carpet he could ever see himself calling a part of his home. Then, he left. Left the only place he ever could consider that home with that carpet, and those people inside who he cared about so much more than anyone he’d ever meet. The only family he could have, and it was official now. He was no longer a part of that.

Hitori Uzune was alone in the world, at age ten. Time to learn how it all worked. And as he stepped out of that door, the lessons he’d already learned all came back to him. That’s right. The world’s not kind at all, to bad children who steal and run away and try to walk alone on dark and stormy evenings. He slept in the car, as they brought him back to the place that /they/ called home, but he hurt. He hurt physically, and there was an emptiness inside of him. He didn’t know what had happened to him. It was all a blur and the memories, if he had them, were locked away tight. All he knew was that he was a dinstinctly less happy person than he had been when he woke up this morning.


End file.
